Wasting Paul Ryan?

[Geee]

American Spectator:

OH, NO! WHAT A WASTE!” called out my wife when I stuck my head into her study with the news that Governor Romney’s choice for vice president was Paul Ryan. “What do you mean?” I demanded. After all, I’d been listening for years to her singing the praises of the Badger State Brain. “He’s needed in the House,” she said. “Well,” replied I, “he’s only going over to the Senate.” This is when she, who has already forgotten more about politics than I’ll ever know, declared: “Now don’t you try your constitutional tricks on me.”

 

It’s no longer exactly news that the vice president isn’t necessarily part of the executive branch. This is owing to Vice President Cheney. He tried to squirm out of handing over documents that Congressman Henry Waxman wanted by asserting that the vice president was part of the legislative branch. Cheney pointed out that the only duty the Constitution gave him, absent the death or departure of the president, was to serve as president of the Senate. So a “legislative officer” was what claimed to be, and, as such, he wasn’t covered by the executive order Waxman was waving.

 

“The political backlash engendered by this position led Cheney’s office to withdraw to the more defensible position that the Office of the Vice President, like the Office of the President, was not an ‘agency’ for purposes of the statute,” is the way one sage, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, writing in the Northwestern University Law Review, summarizes the denouement. Reynolds notes, however, that Cheney’s spokesmen never repudiated the earlier position. He goes on to say that he himself believes that “the positioning of the Vice Presidency within the legislative branch—or, at any rate, outside the executive—may be appropriate.”